


Object Lesson

by bees_stories



Series: The New Team Torchwood Adventures [13]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Blood and Gore, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Foreplay, Hurt/Comfort, Jack-Centric, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Not Really Character Death, Post-Canon, Post-Case, Public Hand Jobs, Slice of Life, relationship angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 22:04:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6826591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bees_stories/pseuds/bees_stories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Jack is hurt on a mission that goes wrong, he learns the hard way that sometimes it's not a good idea to push when Ianto is processing his own emotional fallout.</p><p>This story contains implied violence and sexual imagery. It is set during the New Team Torchwood Era, however it doesn't require in depth knowledge of the rest of the series to make sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Object Lesson

*****

They had gone to the public swimming baths to meet an informant named Baltha, a Taxan refugee who looked human enough, if you failed to notice the webbing between his fingers and toes, and the faint gill-line underneath his collarbone. The humid, chlorine-saturated air in the enclosed building wasn't really ideal from Jack's point of view, but Baltha had insisted. Jack knew it reminded the other alien of his homeworld, a place that for complicated reasons, he had no desire to return to any time soon, but missed with a faint sense of nostalgia.

The meeting had been productive. Baltha had tipped them off to a ring of smugglers looking to improve their profits by trafficking human slaves to select buyers. They had kidnapped four people off the street in the last month – evidently they had a laundry list of qualifications they were working from – and tomorrow they were heading home. Jack had passed the information along to Andy so that he could begin to coordinate the rescue operation, but until they were ready to swing into action, there was little reason to make a hasty return to the Hub. 

He glanced over at Ianto. He was clad in a pair of tiny red swimming shorts that Jack had given him in the early days of their cat and mouse seduction. During those first weeks Jack had thought of himself as the cat. It had only been later, after things had fallen apart, that the true nature of who was toying with whom had been revealed, and he had been forcibly reminded that when the stakes are high enough, even a conmen can be conned. Those had been interesting, but ultimately unhappy times, long put behind them. Jack frowned, wondering why – when he had seen Ianto many time clad in those same shorts – had he not made the association with those dark days. Maybe it was a residual effect from last night's misadventure. Jack thought he had been in control of that situation too, only to be proved grievously mistaken. 

"Are you all right? Your arm isn't troubling you, is it?" 

Jack shook his head reflexively, brushing away the display of concern. He then gave Ianto a smile that was meant to be reassuring, but because Ianto could read him like a book, it probably wasn't. With a suppressed sigh, Jack realised he must have let his mask slip while his mind was wandering and he had accidentally revealed some of what was going on inside his head. He was still processing. Still categorising his list of errors and missteps. He had screwed up missions before, but last night was the first time that someone had literally ripped off his arm and beaten him to death with it over a slip up in protocol. 

"I'm fine. Honestly. I was just thinking we haven't had a morning to ourselves like this in far too long." He upped the wattage of his smile and tried to put a devil may care twinkle in his eye. "If it gets me time alone with you, maybe I should let myself get dismembered more often." 

By the sudden shifting of his irises from pale blue to slate grey, it was clear that Ianto wasn't amused. But he blanked his discontent quickly and shook his head as if he was faintly disappointed by the blatant come on. "You'll take any excuse you can get, won't you, Jack," he remarked dryly.

Jack play pouted at the brusque response, but didn't take it to heart. Ianto had been coordinating a backup response when things had gone sideways. He was the one who had successfully jumped in and managed the situation so that their team, including Jack's corpse, could be extracted without any further casualties on either side, and then convinced the Bathesi delegation that it would be in everyone's best interest if no more of their people visited Earth.

Ianto blew out a breath. He rose abruptly from his chair and said, "As long as we're here, I'm going for a swim. I'd ask you to join me, but Dr Porter specifically instructed me that you weren't to tax your arm."

"It's fine!" Jack protested automatically, even though, truth be told, he still felt sort of puny. It wasn't from bleeding out, he'd done that before plenty of times with no residual effect. But his shoulder and upper arm felt strange. Sort of not quite in sync with the the rest of his body. Maybe, even though he had successfully resurrected, the muscle fibres and nerve endings were still under repair, forging links that had been abruptly torn asunder.

Ianto didn't call him a liar, but the accusation was written in the flat set of his mouth as he stripped off his tee-shirt and then stalked over to the poolside. 

This time, Jack was tempted to sulk in earnest, but he knew that wasn't a fair reaction. Ianto was upset and he had good reason. The previous night's events had stretched his not inconsiderable tactical and diplomatic skills to the limit, and then forced him to contend with a medical emergency that was far outside his experience. He had no idea how Jack's body would react to being as damaged as it had been, because Jack hadn't known either. The few times Ianto had tried to bring the topic up before it had seemed better to deflect a serious discussion rather than contemplate the unknowable too deeply.

Covered in Jack's blood and mentally exhausted, all Ianto could do was take his best guess and hope that he was right. He had ordered Felicity to clean the wounds carefully, so that there was no foreign matter for Jack's body to reject, and then suture the arm roughly back into place, hoping that proximity would be all that was required for the resurrection process to repair the damage. 

Without thinking, Jack glanced over at his arm and then ran his fingertips lightly over the cotton of his shirtsleeve. He wondered – not for the first time – if the damage had been too great, or if Ianto hadn't had been able to recover the severed limb, if a new arm would have grown in the missing one's place. For some reason, rather than being reassured that he would never be permanently marred by his misadventures, he found the notion disconcerting. His morbid thoughts drifted uncomfortably to the severed arm. Would it, under the right circumstances, grow a new Jack to replace the one it had lost? 

A raft of clouds rolled over the glass-ceilinged building and Jack shivered, not from a sudden chill, but because some things were too grim to contemplate, even after being numbed by enduring a lifetime of horrors. There was no comfort in following the morbid line of thinking to its logical conclusion.

 _Worry about it when it happens,_ he told himself. _In the meantime, pack it away and take in the view._

This time of the morning – in the gap between the early morning enthusiasts, who got in a few laps before they hurried off to the next stop in their over-scheduled daily routines, and the arrival of the yummy mummy brigade hoping for a good session of gossip and humble bragging about their offspring's latest achievements while they worked off the last of their pregnancy pounds – the pool was quiet. But there was really only one person Jack was interested in watching, and that was Ianto. He was venting his stress by swimming hard, cutting through the water at a racer's pace, knifing underneath the surface when he reached the other side, and then pushing off again for another punishing lap.

Watching Ianto's body in motion was definitely a perk, and one he was glad to savour. But Jack couldn't shake the feeling that he needed one of Ianto's tongue lashings. Ianto never wasted his anger. He preferred to save it for times when it might make a difference rather than indiscriminately venting his spleen over minor irritations. When the mood took him, Ianto had a way of dishing out home truths, generously sprinkled with bitingly sarcastic bon mots that hit vulnerable targets with deadly accuracy. 

Jack wondered if he should pick a fight. Would hearing Ianto give voice to his fears and anxieties allow them both to let go of what had happened and move on? He mulled the thought for a time, trying to come up with a provocative barb to use as an opening gambit, but nothing came to him. He touched his arm again tentatively. The odd sensation that he couldn't accurately put a name to had vanished. He raised his palm to shoulder height and felt no discomfort. In fact, his entire arm felt as if it had never been damaged, let alone used as a murder weapon. 

A brainwave hit him. Smiling with anticipation, Jack shrugged out of his shirt and dropped it on top of Ianto's. He strolled over to the pool and slipped quietly into the water, shivered as his body got used to the sudden temperature change, and then he flipped onto his back and took his first, tentative stroke. 

There was no reason for the intense feeling of relief that came from not having his arm fall off and sink to the bottom of the pool, but that didn't stop Jack as he succumbed to an attack of giddy laughter. He giggled, loudly, and looked for Ianto to gauge his reaction.

Ianto hadn't noticed. He had paused in the shallow end for a breather, gripping the edge of the pool with one hand as he took in deep lungfuls of air. 

Jack dove underneath the surface of the water. He acquired his target – the tightly fitting red swim shorts were clearly visible – and swam quickly, but stealthily, towards them. He felt powerful as he cut through the silent water, his now completely healed arm functioned perfectly. With every stroke and every yard gained his disconcerting thoughts about dismembered limbs that grew bodies of their own faded until they were no more substantial than the after-image of a particularly vivid nightmare. By the time he reached Ianto, even the after-images had dissipated.

Ianto was getting ready to boost himself out of the swimming pool. Jack put on a burst of speed and reached out. He grabbed his prey around the thighs – missing his desired target as Ianto reacted – and pressed a kiss against the waistband of the swimming shorts instead. 

It was with an unceremonious tug that Jack was hauled upward and set on his feet. He grinned at Ianto cheekily, knowing he was in for a bollocking, and not really caring. 

Ianto eyed Jack with a critical expression. His gaze lingered briefly on the right side of Jack's body before returning to his face. His eyes were caught between sea blue and slate grey, unreadable. Finally he let out an exasperated breath. "You scared the shit out of me last night. I hope you know that." He spoke with a quiet intensity that revealed the depth of his emotion. 

Jack nodded. "I know. I'm sorry. About screwing up the mission. About what happened after." 

"I didn't know what to do," Ianto continued as if Jack hadn't spoken. He sounded angry at himself for not having a contingency plan in place.

Jack shrugged. "Then we're even, Ianto. If I was you I wouldn't have known what to do either. There's a first time for everything, and you just happened to be there when this first time happened. I can't promise you it won't happen again. That I won't die in some new and horrible way. You know that, right?" 

Ianto stared down at the water intently. It was as if he was contemplating all the worst case scenarios that could befall them. After several long and heart-wrenching moments, he looked up again. "How do you live with it? The not knowing?"

Jack shrugged again. The conversation wasn't exactly going to plan, but at least Ianto was talking. "The not knowing if there's an injury I can't come back from? Or the not knowing that one of these days something really weird might happen? Trust me, Ianto, you're not the only one who was worried about what that severed arm might do." 

Ianto's expression became startled and Jack grinned at him. The tension that had been simmering between them all morning had all but evaporated. "A spare me could be handy," he teased in a sing-song voice.

"One of you is already a handful," Ianto retorted, but there was no threat of a bite behind his growling reply.

Jack reached down into the water and proved Ianto's point, finding his earlier target and giving it a gentle squeeze. 

"Time and place, Captain," Ianto said, even as he leaned reflexively into the caress. 

There was at least two hours before they needed to be back at the Hub to gear up for the night's rescue mission. That was plenty of time to put things completely right between them, and to prove to Ianto's satisfaction that he was well and truly fighting fit. Jack bent forward and whispered in Ianto's ear. "Right now and your place?" 

The first of the yummy mummies sauntered out of the women's changing room. She dropped her towel on a deckchair at the opposite end of the pool and began taking mock strokes, cutting through the air in a way that showed off her well toned arms and generously proportioned chest. 

Ianto glanced over at her, more to gauge whether she could see what was going on in the shallow end rather than with anything approaching carnal interest. Satisfied that she was too self-absorbed to take notice of them, he pushed his hand past the waistband of Jack's swim trunks. 

Jack gasped – a strangled sound that was a mixture of pleasure and surprise – and looked at Ianto with wide eyes as his trunks were shoved down over his buttocks to rest around his thighs. "What happened to time and place?" His gaze darted to the parade of yummy mummies who were entering in groups of twos and threes, calling greetings to one another. 

Fun was fun, and what Ianto was doing _definitely_ qualified. But the Swimfit instructor had just entered, and was heading towards them at a irritated clip. 

"Ianto!" Jack warned in a hissing whisper. He was embarrassingly close to finishing what Ianto had started, and honestly wouldn't have minded the audience if it wasn't for the likelihood of ending up before a magistrate. "Company!" 

Ianto let go abruptly, leaving Jack hanging precipitously on the edge. He hauled himself free of the water, greeted the Swimfit instructor politely, and began to gather up his belongings as if he hadn't a single care in the world.

For several long and awkward moments, Jack stood baffled, contemplating what had just happened. On the one hand, he had managed to get Ianto to give voice to what was upsetting him. On the other hand, it was clear that Ianto was still harbouring some residual hostility. Why else would he have used his favourite erotic tricks to work Jack up to the brink of orgasm at the most awkward time imaginable, and then abandon him to come up with his own exit strategy?

The epiphany hit like a dull blow between the eyes. The cheeky proposition had been too soon. Despite the thaw in his attitude, Ianto hadn't entirely let go of his anger and he had decided that an object lesson was in order. 

_Let's see how you like it, Jack,_ Ianto's indifferent saunter seemed to say. _Being left to cope on your own under the worst possible circumstances._

"You've got a vindictive streak, Ianto Jones," Jack said softly as the Swimfit instructor blew her whistle, calling her class to order. The sky above them darkened and the interior lights flickered to life. Knowing there was no other way out, Jack used the momentary confusion to yank his swim trunks back into a semblance of order and get himself out of the pool and into the safety of the changing room. 

Ianto had already cleared out, but he had left a note behind on Jack's locker. 

_My place. Fifteen minutes._

When he exited the building four minutes later, Jack was greeted by a dull rumble of thunder that preceded a driving rain shower. He pulled his coat collar tight around his throat and glumly contemplated the deluge. 

A minicab pulled up in front of the swim centre and the driver rolled down the window. "You Jack Harkness?"

Uncertainly, Jack nodded his head. 

"Get in, then." 

Jack grinned as he contemplated the machinations of Ianto's mind, and realised that now that the lesson was ended, he was probably forgiven after all.

end


End file.
